Well, that’s really not a good way to live, now is it? It’s an even worse way to treat your personal data. In today’s world, where more and more is done in the “digital world,” the need to protect your data is critical.

The “Old Days”

Think of your hard drives as the file boxes of the past, where your parents would stash your 3rd grade art projects, photos of you as a kid, and your “hand turkeys”—sorry, it’s a New England thing. Now think about how you’d go about getting that stuff back if, heaven forbid, your home was to be destroyed by fire.

Storage of Today

Well, the same goes for hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, flash cards, etc. If they’re damaged accidentally or by catastrophe, they’re gone. Lucky for us, it’s a heck of a lot easier to make a copy of a hard drive full of photos than it is to make a copy of a cardboard box full of keepsakes.

The Danger

Electronic storage media has a number of weaknesses: data corruption, small size makes them easy to lose, prone to fire and water damage, as well as theft. Spill a glass of your favorite IPA all over your photos hard drive? Well, those are gone. Ran over your backup drive with your Jeep? Yep, that’s gone too. Your car was broken into and your camera and photos drive were stolen? You get the picture…

Protecting Yourself

Protecting yourself from data loss is pretty easy when it comes down to it. You just need to know what your risks are (the aforementioned theft, physical damage, and data corruption being the big ones), and how to mitigate them.

Creating a backup strategy doesn’t have to take all day, and it doesn’t have to be terribly expensive. You can protect your data without breaking the bank. I’ll talk about two different options below, and you can work from whichever sounds better to you.

We know that we can lose data, either due to technical issues or problems arising in the physical world. What’s the best way to mitigate those risks?

Make copies.

Making Copies

That’s really what a backup strategy comes down to: copies. You should always have 3 copies of your data. Your first copy is your “working set.” This is the data you work on—your photos that you download from your camera or smartphone, your documents on your computer. This is the data that you will back up.

Your second copy is your backup. This is where you will restore from if you accidentally delete a file or folder, if your computer’s hard drive fails, etc. This lives on-site with your devices, usually in your home. An example of this would be an external hard drive that you use on your Mac with Time Machine, Apple’s backup software built into their OS.

The third copy is the most important—this is the “Oh, crap!” backup. This is the backup of the backup. This is the data set that you will fall back on when something catastrophic happens: your home is destroyed by fire, all your computer equipment is stolen, a lightning strike destroyed your computer and your backup drive, etc.

How does this all fit together?

Option 1: On-Premise Storage

This is just a fancy way of saying you do it all in-house.

In this example, I have my computer. Connected to my computer is an 8TB USB hard drive that holds all of my photos. I also have a 3TB external USB hard drive that I use with Apple’s Time Machine.

Time Machine backs up my computer, including all of my documents, to the external hard drive. If I delete anything by accident, or if my computer crashes and I need to rebuild, I can simply restore from Time Machine or even copy the files directly off of the external drive.

Buying in Pairs

When I bought the 3TB and 8TB drives, I actually bought two of each: one to work from, and one for a backup. This is actually a habit I suggest everyone get themselves into—always buy drives in pairs. Sure, it’s more expensive, but think of it this way: If the drive costs $199, is spending an extra $199 worth the trouble losing all your data would cause? The answer is almost always yes.

Backing up External Disks

I work from the main Photos drive, then once a month, I duplicate the entire Photos drive onto the backup drive. Then, I take that backup drive with me to work and leave it at the office until the following month. This way, I have an off-site copy of all of my Photos if anything happens to my home. You could do the same with a safe deposit box, a friend’s house (better trust that friend, or encrypt your backups!), or even just in your car if you had to.

I do the same thing with my Time Machine drive. I plug in the Backup Time Machine drive and use a program called Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the main Time Machine drive to the backup.

Option 2: Cloud Storage

This is an option that isn’t for everyone, but it’s a great option to have. If you have high-speed internet at home, and you’re not working with HUGE data sets, this could work out for you.

My new backup strategy at home differs a bit from Option 1, in that I no longer keep 3 physical copies of my data—the second set of drives I’d carry back and forth to work have been replaced with a cloud-backup service called CrashPlan. I’ll get into why I chose CrashPlan in another post, but for now all you need to know is CrashPlan is a cloud-backup provider.

I still have my desktop computer. I still have my 8TB Photos drive. I still have my 3TB Time Machine drive. Time Machine still backs up my desktop computer to the 3TB drive. Now, however, the off-site storage is achieved by backing up all of my data to CrashPlan’s servers over the internet.

This happens automatically. I chose what I wanted to send (basically everything on the desktop computer, plus the entire contents of my 8TB drive), and CrashPlan takes care of the rest. No more carrying drives around every month!

Transfer Time Considerations

A couple of things that make this work really well for me: I’m only backing up about 2TB of data, and my home internet is 150Mbps/150Mbps, which means I have a pretty fast upload speed. This isn’t true of all home internet, so keep this in mind—the slower your network connection, the longer the initial back up will take.

CrashPlan offers a service where you can send them a hard drive full of data first and ship it to them and they’ll load it into your account for you and ship it back. This overcomes the initial backup of moving all of your data to your cloud provider.

Once the initial backup is complete, whether you shipped them your data or sent it over the internet, the CrashPlan app continually monitors your files. Anytime anything changes, even just a tiny bit, CrashPlan copies just that tiny bit that changed up to their servers. It only sends the whole file when it needs to, so you get much better effective transfer rates this way.

Restoring from Backup

The other transfer time consideration is restoring. When you’re just restoring a few files, you can do that right from the web and download them. When you need to restore a whole drive or just a whole folder, it will take some time. In the case of a full drive recovery, you can have them ship you a drive (or drives) full of your stuff. You’ll have to pay for the service, the drives, and the shipping… but you get your stuff back.

Testing Your Backups

The most important—and yet most often overlooked—part of a backup strategy is testing. Backing up all of your data is great, but what if it’s not working? It’s especially important to test your backups at least once in a while (I like once a month) to ensure that you have good backups.

Going to restore after a catastrophic loss can become painful if your backups are no good. This is why it’s important to test.

You don’t have to overwrite files when you restore—just restore them to your Downloads folder to see if it works, and if it does, delete the restored files.

Have Fun, Keep Your Data Safe!

OK, so now that all of that is out of the way go take more photos, record more music, shoot more video—and keep all of that data safe!

I recently accompanied a friend to the Apple Store in Boston on a trip to pick up her new laptop. The Apple saleswoman said something about Apple recommending that you disable full disk encryption “unless you need it because you keep sensitive information on the machine because it slows it down.” Ever the IT guy, I questioned her immediately on that. I asked if Apple actually tells them to recommend that practice, and she confirmed. I couldn’t believe it.

I know that Apple uses Intel chips in their machines. I also know that every modern Intel chip Apple uses in the MacBook Pro line include a dedicated AES encryption acceleration instruction set called AES-NI. FileVault uses AES. With the crazy fast SSDs Apple puts in these machines, and the native AES acceleration built into the processor there’s no noticeable slowdown. I personally own a 2013 MacBook Air that includes AES acceleration, and I have FileVault configured for full disk encryption of the internal SSD. My SSD gets somewhere around 600-800MB/s read and write speeds. The only slowdown is when you first power on the machine after it’s been powered off. After you enter your password on the initial login, it takes about 15 seconds to unlock the drive and log you in. After that, no delays at all. Resuming from sleep is instant—log in and you get your desktop right away. No sluggish file copying, nothing.

Why would Apple recommend disabling a crucial security feature like full disk encryption when even older machines can run it with ease? It seems silly to me, especially with all the security risks we have these days.

Personally, I use full disk encryption on everything I own now. MacBook Air, the custom built “hackintosh” desktop at home, work laptop, even my NAS server at home. It slows things down a bit on the NAS (I lose about 20MB/s on what would be a 110MB/s transfer with encryption disabled), but not so much that I’m worried about it. It’s plenty fast enough for my needs.

Today, I’m sharing a quick review of the tripod I’ve been using for the better part of 2 years now. There are no affiliate links in the review below, the link provided is where I purchased mine.

True to it’s name, the MeFOTO GlobeTrotter makes an excellent travel tripod. I purchased mine shortly after buying my Canon EOS 6D, which was my first “real” camera that cost more than a few hundred bucks. As I learned and shot more, I realized how useful a tripod could be. I decided to bite the bullet and pick up a tripod prior to a cross-country road trip with a friend.

Generally I stick to what I’ve heard called “the buy once, cry once” philosophy when it comes buying gear. I buy the best quality I can afford, intending to keep it for many years, rather than buy the least expensive option and end up replacing it far sooner and spending more in the long run. As an amateur photographer, I couldn’t fathom spending thousands on a tripod when it really isn’t going to help my photography any more than a $200-$300 tripod would. Sure, it would have been really cool to have super light carbon-fiber legs and a fancy high-end ball head, but I’m nowhere near ready for gear like that.

I set out to spend between two hundred and three hundred dollars on a decent tripod. My initial requirements were:

Packs down as small as possible. I like to hike and travel, so portability is a must.

Ball head. I’d never owned one, but everyone said “get a ball head”. I’m a sheep.

Arca-Swiss style quick-release plate. I like this better than the locking lever type of quick-release system.

I honestly didn’t look at too many models, because the MeFOTO line caught my eye almost immediately. I went with the GlobeTrotter for height more than anything, but it still packs down to under 16” and weighs less than 5 pounds. The “titanium” color was the least attention-grabbing of those available to me, so I decided to go with something less flashy than bright blue or red.

In the end, I paid $249 for the GlobeTrotter at B&H Photo & Video. Ground shipping from New York to the Boston area is cheap and arrives next day, and they have great customer service—which incidentally came in handy when the first tripod shipped was missing the horizontal panning lock knob. After a brief exchange of emails, a new one was on it’s way for the next day along with a return shipping label for the first tripod.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I was off to give the GlobeTrotter a real test on a cross-country road trip in a Jeep. It got bounced around, set up in water, mud, and dusty areas. It visited Theodore Roosevelt, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, as well as a number of National Forests and state parks. It was great to be able to fold up my tripod and toss it in my rucksack when it wasn’t needed. I also took it on a road trip around Iceland more recently, and it was a joy to have for that trip as well.

The way the GlobeTrotter folds up was a bit interesting to me at first. You have to remember to fully raise the head extension before folding up the legs, but it’s easy enough to get the hang of. The plus of this setup is you can use the hook under the ball head to fasten the tripod to a carrying handle of sorts or anything else you can rig up. It’s not the intended use of the hook, but it works well enough for me (though I’m not sure how it would affect your warranty, should the hook break. In other words, don’t try this at home. If you do, it’s at your own risk.). I hang it from the lower portion of the shoulder straps of my ruck if I need to free up my hands for something else.

The GlobeTrotter is equipped with a ball head and an Arca-Swiss style quick-release system, which comes with one plate that will fit most cameras. The plate fits into a channel on the top of the clamp, and you twist a knob to lock and unlock it. The clamp makes a secure connection between your camera and the tripod when properly mounted. I’ve used it at some fun angles and never suffered any issues or dropped cameras as a result of the clamp failing. I find this type of quick-release more secure and generally a bit more stable. I’ve used locking-lever quick releases in the past with camcorders, and the plates tend to have a little play in them—but to be fair, they were very cheap tripods, so your mileage may vary.

The one area that I think the GlobeTrotter suffers is a consequence of it’s small design: to fold up small, you need more leg segments to get to the desired height. The result is a slightly slower setup if you’re going to fully extend the legs. It led to quite a bit of walking around with the legs fully extended and folded in rather than collapsing the legs over and over. It’s an acceptable trade-off for the added portability of the smaller package and being able to just toss it in my ruck.

The GlobeTrotter can support up to 17 pounds on the tripod, which isn’t really a concern for me since my camera and heaviest lens weigh 7 pounds together. This becomes a benefit though, as the legs are thicker to support the extra weight compared to some of the smaller MeFOTO tripods, translating into added stability for lighter loads too and making it a good choice for me for long exposures like Milky Way shots. It keeps my camera stable even in breezy weather, reducing the risk of blur from shaking. The legs can be locked in one of two positions, allowing for a wider stance for added stability in windy conditions, or to get a lower shot. As an added bonus, you can flip the ball head onto the bottom of the center pole to suspend the camera under the tripod legs for some creative positioning.

After a year of use, I’ve come to the conclusion that the MeFOTO GlobeTrotter is an excellent choice for a lower-priced yet still feature-packed tripod for travelers and those photographers with an active lifestyle who still want to carry a tripod.

A final note about cleaning:

As with any tripod, I suggest thoroughly cleaning it after any trip or every few shorter outings. The twist-collar style leg segments have fine threads, which can wear prematurely if they get jammed up with sand. Just unscrew it all the way and slide the collar out of the way, being careful not to pull the leg segment completely out while it’s unscrewed. Blow any sand out of the threads inside the collar and on the leg with compressed air. For any stubborn bits of sand or dirt, I like to use a microfiber vehicle dusting towel to wipe around the threads. Once the threads are clear, reattach the collar and tighten it. Expect this to take a good 30 minutes due to the number of locking collars.

In honor of Spring, which feels like it may have already sprung in Boston, I’m airing out some dirty laundry, so to speak. We’re going to talk guilty pleasures. You know, those stupid little things that you just know your friends are going to bust your balls about, but you do them anyway.

I’ve been going through some old playlists and found a fun one that I’d never listen to without headphones for fear that someone may notice what I’m listening to.

I don’t know that I’d call this a genre, but more a collection of artists and songs I refer to as “candy pop.” You’ll understand why when you begin listening to the sugary-sweet, super catchy hooks. A word of warning: Don’t listen to this playlist more than once. It gets annoying fast.

I’m sharing this fully expecting my friends to give me a ton of crap about it, so feel free to join them, you can find me on Twitter at @bill_clark.

Without further ado, I present to you, the Candy Pop Spotify playlist: